5 Blogging Blunders To Avoid

Creating a blog is easy. Creating a blog that people read regularly isn’t. It’s easy to get carried away with the initial excitement and freedom of blogging without considering what your audience want. Here are five common mistakes that new bloggers make when first getting started.

Not doing your research

Too many bloggers will start scribing away without taking the time to research their audience and their competition. There are countless fashion blogs and music blogs and food blogs out there – you need to work out first what your blogs needs to stand out. Look at what other blogs are doing so that you can borrow ideas and similarly find your own personal style.

It may also be worth getting to grips with the blogging mechanics by reading a start a blog guide online. This could help you to better understand what makes an engaging post and how to format posts.

Being too wordy

A blog shouldn’t be a wall of text. As well as using paragraph spacing and images, make use of the freedoms that a blog has to offer as opposed to a magazine or a newspaper. You can use videos and widgets to make your blog more exciting, and use different colours and fonts and sizes to highlight information. Make your posts look exciting and people will be more willing to read.

Staying off social media

Every blogger needs to make use of social media, this is where you can connect directly with your audience and keep them updated on your content. Create a Facebook and Twitter page for your blog and invite all your friends and followers to join. You can then post all content on here manually once it’s published, or use an automation tool. You can even pay to promote posts – this will expose your posts to an even greater audience on social media.

Ignoring analytics

Having an analytics plug-in installed on your blog is essential. Content management systems such as Blogger already have Google Analytics installed on them. These analytics show you which posts are most popular, when they are being visited, who is visiting them and where they are visiting from. Knowing which posts are popular can allow you to create more content of a similar theme, whilst knowing your audience allows you to cater for them more and market your blog more successfully.

Neglecting hyperlinks

Hyperlinks don’t just direct readers to other parts of the web, they can in fact draw in more readers. They’re an essential part of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) – which is essentially how far up your blog ranks on the search engines such as Google and Yahoo when people search for keywords. Appropriately using hyperlinks will boost your website up the rankings on search engines. There are lots of online resources to show you how – just take this hyperlink as an example. You can also redirect readers to other content on your blog. A balance of external and internal links could see your readership soaring.